Seven Stages of Grief
by SnowStormSkies
Summary: The day that Gibbs died was the day that the team became divided, isolated from each other, alone on their islands of grief. Pain and grief are universal concepts, but there are always differences in how people grieve and feel pain. Team-fic
1. Six Stages of Grief

**Title: **Seven Stages of Grief

**Author: **Snowstormskies

**Universe:** NCIS

**Theme/Topic: **After the death of someone close, destruction rages rampant amongst those left.

**Rating:** T+

**Characters: **Tony, Abby, McGee, Ducky, Ziva, Jenny, Gibbs, Jimmy.

**Warnings/Spoilers:** Umm... Not really. Perhaps post season six, I think. I shouldn't think you'd need to know much more than that.

**Word Count:** 1937 words for this chapter – 4487 words total.

**Time:** About five days. It kind of...seeped out.

**Summary:** The day that Gibbs died was the day that the team became divided, isolated from each other, alone on their islands of grief. Pain and grief are universal concepts, but there are always differences in how people grieve and feel pain.

**Dedication:** To the few on earth who still remember the good ol' days before NCIS turned into something beyond wrong.

**A/N: **Ummm... I'm not really sure where this one came from. I think, though I couldn't be sure, my dreams might have had something to do with it. It's something really rather strange. I know, I know. Everyone is begging me for updates across the board, I'm sorry. Look, I'll even post this and another one just to make it up to you, but please! Have patience and you shall have finished stories! I promise *running away*

**Distribution:** Mine. Not yours. Bugger off. Or ask for permission. Either or...

**Disclaimer:** Everything belongs to someone else - not me, I make no money and I use the characters safely and responsibly!

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**_Seven Stages of Grief_**

**The day that Gibbs died was the day that the team became divided, isolated from each other, alone on their islands of grief. Pain and grief are universal concepts, but there are always differences in how people grieve and feel pain. **

_Shock – _Abby lives in a perpetual daze after the incident. Barely eats, barely sleeps, barely lives. She goes through her day like a robot, completing tests and running down analyses but she's lost her sparkle, her shine. No more 'Scene Abby', no more 'Guess The Result' games, no more hugs and kisses. She clings to the few she has left, and cuts herself off from everybody else. Her speakers no longer blast _"Undead Zombie,"_ or_ "Final HOWLING"._ Instead, for weeks, the mournful wails of gospel hymns and the powerful lyrics of long dead blues artists pour through the mesh of the speakers, intermittently cut with long periods of silence, where the only sound is her tears and her sobs. Gibbs was her father, her friend, her drive _and her inspiration._ His presence was motivation, his pride a goal to win, his kisses rewards for a job well done. When he died, so did she. She was sure he would always be there, always a constant presence in her life, but now all she has left is a veil of shock pulled over her mind – an impenetrable wall that she can't move past. She _can't_ move on.

_Disorganisation – _McGee finds himself struggling to function in the days and weeks after Gibbs' death. He comes to work wearing two different coloured socks, wearing yesterday's shirt and forgetting his lunch. He can't find his gym bag, his sneakers mysteriously lose their laces every time he puts them away, and he forgets his password almost every other day. Tim can't remember the last time he cooked his own food, or what his publisher said last time they spoke – he keeps putting her off for writing a new book – LJ Tibbs' inspiration is gone. Left. Abandoned. He puts his clothes through the wash before remembering to take out pens, pencils and notepads; he only finds out when he takes them out and his crisp white shirts have turned into grey dingy wrecks. He can't recall how he got to work, frequently is late to work because he lost his car keys and has to take a taxi, he offers to pay for lunch and it turns it out he's left his wallet at home. He's all over the disorganisation stage of grief as he has to repair the hole in his soul that Gibbs used to fill.

_Denial – _Jenny's manages denial pretty well for all of them. After all, if one does not think about, it cannot be real – a dead Gibbs cannot _be dead_ if one does not think of him as such. Yes, she has it covered – she still CCs Gibbs on the departmental memos, still has him on speed dial one on her mobile phone, has his mail redirected to her house so she can keep it for him. Sometimes she wonders why she doesn't just replace Gibbs with Tony on her speed dial, send out official notices of death to his mortgage company and sell his house, but on the really bad days, when there are terrorists howling at the door, bureaucrats demanding her attention, mountains of paper that never go away and when the full weight of the agency rests heavy on her shoulders, she goes to his house, unlocks the door that was never locked when he was alive and sits on his sofa, reads his books, cooks in his kitchen or just sits in the basement beneath the boat that will never be finished now. She can still smell the sawdust, the faint trace of bourbon, and the smell that was so indefinably Gibbs she could almost pretend he just stepped out for a moment and he'll be back any second. She can almost pretend that Gibbs is still alive, still breathing, still waiting for her. Logically, she knows full well he's dead and buried. Irrationally, emotionally and against all the evidence, she still likes to pretend sometimes. _He can't be dead, if she never forgets._

_Depression – _Ducky knows he's got depression down to a T. He's not blind to Abby's clutching almost childishly to his hand every night when she leaves, Tony dropping in and staying longer than a flying visit to collect autopsy reports – the fact that Jimmy counts every scalpel and needle before locking the door and waiting for him to go home first. Even the Director herself sometimes graces him with her presence, though those visits are often awkward and painful on both parties. Sometimes, Ducky lets himself think how much he would give to drink during the day, but he has to content himself with nights spent sinking into a bourbon fuelled stupor, memories of his dead friend spilling out of him like the whiskey spills into the glass he pours himself as soon as he walks in the door. He spends hours in the dark, fighting back tears of anger, rage and grief, waking up the next morning with a mouth that feels like it is full of sawdust, a head that feels like a single raw nerve ending and pain in his soul, the likes he has not felt since his mother died all of four years ago. No more "What'cha got, Duck?", no more evenings of watching a boat come to life, slowly and patiently, no more long lazy evenings of drinking hundred year old ale and contemplating the future. No more Gibbs.

_Guilt – _Ziva's got guilt. She's guilty, _guilty, __**guilty...**_What-ifs, the knowledge of deeds you can never undo, past mistakes haunting her mind every step, every turn. Nightmares of what happened that day, the aftermath and the shattering of everything she knew keep her awake at night, force her out of bed in the early hours to run, run, _run_ away from them. At four in the morning, she pulls on sneakers, takes to the park to pound out the nightmares – by the end of an eighteen hour day, she hopes she is tired enough to collapse into bed and gather a few precious hours sleep before the nightmares return. During the day, while sat at her desk, even under the bright, invasive lights of the bullpen, she can picture Gibbs' face, his bloody hands slack around his weapon. She can still feel the pain of the burning rubble under her hands, still see behind her eyelids the dead eyes of someone she had grown to genuinely love. She wonders every day whether she could have saved him, whether if she'd been a bit faster, a bit more aware, a bit more _better_, she could have saved him. Every day, Ziva endures the torture of Survivor's Guilt and every night, she endures the guilt that comes with thinking of it.

_Anxiety – _Jimmy has Anxiety – he knows he does because that's what the department shrink diagnosed him with and he agrees. Every strange noise has to be investigated, at night he triple locks his door with the three brand new shiny silver locks he brought, every single time he enters a room, he turns the lights on and has to check behind the door and everywhere to make sure he's alone. Death still haunts the team – it got Gibbs but there's no telling who it'll get next. Jimmy buys a metal bat to keep by his bed, and another one for by the door in the umbrella rack one of his buddy's gave him, and he does something his mother still can't understand or forgive him for. He buys a gun and a permit, and has the shooting range guys teach him how to use it to defend himself with. He's twenty seven years old, and he's got the paranoia of a man who grew up in the Cold War. He's no Clint Eastwood with the gun but he knows enough to kill a man. At night, sometimes, he can't sleep and so he'll sit in the living room, all the lights turned on and wait anxiously with the gun in his hands, loaded and ready. He's not ready for Death, but the fear is strong enough to inspire him to protect himself. Gibbs died. Jimmy won't let it take him without a fight – he's too afraid to die.

_Aggression _– Tony gets aggression. Oh _yes_, he understands it well. Hours on the punching bag, beating the stuffing out of it while he envisages beating the shit out of the guys who took Gibbs away forever, pounding out every last scrap of energy onto an imamate object. He gets bloody knuckles and strange looks from other people, but he's a _little_ bit too angry to care. At night, he hits the streets, pacing through the concrete jungle of Washington DC, his mind begging for a perp to try it on him, to see if they'll fight him and he can expend some more energy. He's already put away fifteen punks and drug addicts by doing this – even got a _commendation for_ his efforts, even though he wasn't looking for one – only looking for a way to legitimately beat the shit out of something other than a punching bag. He puts every scrap of energy into something physical, into something that will allow him to fight, hurt something or hurt himself. He chases perps for miles, vaulting gates and fences like a mad thing, no longer arresting but _hunting them down_. Tony wins awards for this, medals of achievement, but he gives them to McGee so he can start his own collection of insignificant tokens of merit for a leader who doesn't know courage from stubbornness, and strength from just sheer dumb luck, and a leader who is leading a team when he himself don't know where he is going. He's angry at the world, and he wants the world to know it.

_Resolution – _It takes Tony running straight into a gunfight between gang members, sans bullet proof vest, and carrying enough weaponry to bring down the _Taliban_ before waking up in hospital, an inch from death for the team to realise that Gibbs might be dead, but they all need to pull together. Tony has four broken ribs, broken his right leg, left arm, shattered his elbow, been shot seven times, given himself bleeding on the brain. In surgery, his heart fails, twice. The team is required to contact his emergency contact to verify the surgical team can proceed with the surgery, but when the form comes through, the only contact on there is Gibbs. In the end, the Director signs off on it, and fifteen hours later, Tony is wheeled into a private room.

He looks terrible.

The doctor tells them, kindly but realistically, he might not wake up. If he does, he might not be the same. _If, _not when. When the team understand this, they know that unless they bring it together again Ducky'll drink himself into oblivion, Ziva will eat her own gun, Abby could starve to death, McGee might step into the middle of oncoming traffic without paying attention, Tony will continue to rage against the world, pitting himself against death before the odds stack against him and the die is cast and Death catches up with him and the director might go completely mental before they can save each other.

Tony might have already played his last card, and lost the bet.

Standing around Tony's bed, they make the pact to go forwards, somehow but to go forward none the less.

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**PTO (the last stage is in the next chapter.)**


	2. The Last Stage: Reintegration

**Title: **Seven Stages of Grief Part Two: Reintegration.

**Theme/Topic: **After death, there are always people left behind .

**Rating:** T+

**Warnings/Spoilers:** Umm... Not really. Perhaps post season six, I think. I shouldn't think you'd need to know much more than that.

**Word Count:** 2250 words for this chapter – 4487 words total.

**Summary:** After death there are always people left behind, always people left to pick up the pieces of lives broken in millions of shattered fragments. This happens immediately after the first chapgter – following on from it, but it's slightly different and very much longer so I think you should read that first.

**A/N: **This is the continuation of Part One of SSoG – you should read that first, before reading this.

**Distribution:** Mine. Not yours. Bugger off. Or ask for permission. Either or...

**Disclaimer:** Everything belongs to someone else - not me, I make no money and I use the characters safely and responsibly!

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**Part Two**

**_Reintegration_  
**

_Reintegration - _It's sixteen days before Tony does wake up and another month before the doctors will let him go home. He's half mad on painkillers and his body is full of metal and he has two hundred and ninety four stitches on him. Who knew a human could survive a ninety mile an hour collision with a car and survive, even after being shot?

Ducky invites everyone over to his house – it's more than big enough for them all. He lets them pick bedrooms; it's not perfect and Ziva and Tony squabble over rooms, and Tim leaves half his stuff behind and has to go and get it and Abby's aged trunk breaks half way up the stairs and striped socks, dog collars and platform shoes cascade down the stairs like a tide of clothes. It's still better than being in their own apartments, grief echoing oppressively off empty walls and cheap carpets.

They eat together, drink together, make merry. Make up for lost time.

After the third day, Jimmy stops jumping at every little thing and begins to accept that death isn't coming knocking any time soon. He leaves on day five, taking a taxi to the airport and flying home to stay with his parents. He leaves the gun at Ducky's house.

He's accepted the truth, but he's the only one so far.

On day twenty, after hours of crying, and watching the few known films of Gibbs, poring over pictures of him and comparing stories with the team, the Director declares herself cured of grief, and mentally fit. She signs off on her own psych evaluation, even though that's not permitted. She cooks breakfast on the last day, has her hair cut short and leaves Ducky's house in an NCIS town car, promising to call them from her holiday destination.

Twenty one days after that, she's dead.

Tony and Ducky fly out to retrieve her body, and to establish what happened. They get the phone call from the Mexican authorities, just eighteen minutes after she is confirmed dead. Tony, still bandaged, wearing a sling and casts, limps through the crime scene, where her body laid a few short hours before; it's hard to believe it's been only a day since it happened. Bullet cases litter the floor; puddles of blood indicate the death toll. It's eerily still inside the room, but Tony brushes his hands through the dust, his face dry but his eyes sad. Ducky drives them to the morgue, where they see Jenny lying there, her ribs cracked open between the flaps of skin of the Y incision and her skull exposed as her brain is examined.

The funeral director escorts them out, apologising and begging forgiveness – Ducky waves him off. He knew it would happen and so did Tony. Later, when the numbness wears off and the pain sets in, they will begin to feel horror, but now, nothing.

The Director is given a funeral fit for a president, and is buried in a mahogany coffin strewn with flowers and tear drops. Tony accepts the flag from the top of the coffin as representative of her family – who knew the director had none?

Vance is appointed in her place.

Jenny's reintegration didn't work. She dies with Gibbs' name on her lips, and unrequited love in her heart as she fired a weapon. She knew she was dying, and she didn't care how.

Gibbs would have been proud.

It takes Ducky weeks after Jenny's death to realise that he hasn't cracked the bottle in over three months – since Jenny's death in fact. It's not something he misses – the bottle – he spends his days cooking, cleaning, watching films and reading books. He doesn't care to wake up on the floor or slumped in an uncomfortable chair, mouth tasting of sawdust and his head in agony.

He doesn't go anywhere, but all the liquor finds its way out of the crystal decanters and into the drain.

Abby and Tim wake up next, their ability to bounce back finally back to normal. They're still broken, still in pain over the deaths of two of their closest people, still hopelessly clueless about going forward, but they're better than before. They stay, but out of companionship rather than anything else. Abby begins to listen to things other than gospel hymns – for the first time, the rag time songs of post-funeral celebrations echo out of the speakers of Ducky's aged music system and Tim resurrects Ducky's ancient computer for him, without being asked. They're not fixed, but they're on the way.

It's slow progress, but progress.

Ziva leaves next, but not of her own free will. A mysterious call in the middle of the night, a blaze of Arabic in the morning, and a note on the kitchen table in the early afternoon, and the sound of an embassy town car leaving in the sunset.

She never comes back.

A year after she leaves, news that a ship sunk off the coast of Africa makes the CNN feature segment for a single day. It takes Ziva's father four more months to tell them that Ziva was on that ship.

That night, the sounds of wails and harrowing sorrow come from Ducky's house as the team experiences yet another moment where they are crushed beneath Death.

It found them again.

Two weeks after the news of Ziva's apparent death, the bodies are recovered from the wreck, brought to America to be identified – it's too dangerous to fly them to the middle east at the moment – the Taliban have taken to taking potshots at all aircraft flying over.

It takes dental records, DNA and Tony identifying her Star of David necklace in order for them to establish Ziva's identity. Tony shuts himself in his room, and if Ducky notices that there is a glass antique vase in the trash the next day and pieces embedded in the wall, then he doesn't say.

Ziva is given a Jewish ceremony, cremated according to her will. Ziva's will expresses that her ashes be divided, half scattered to the winds in America, where she learnt to grow, and half in Jordan, where she lived for much of her early life. Ziva's father extends a hand to Tony – it's the only sign of acceptance the man ever gave him.

Tony scatters her ashes on a quiet beach he once took her too – the wind takes them far out to sea. Ziva's father sends him a letter and a disc with a video of him doing the same in Jordan. He tries not to cry too much as he watches her ashes be flung into the air and the water of the river, just as she once requested. It's hard to watch, but he watches alone. McGee requests not to see it, as does Ducky and Abby refuses to, point blank.

He takes flowers to the park, leaves them beneath a tree she once said she sat under. The Agency pays for a plaque to be set up on the ground beside the tree, and gradually, every week there are four bunches of flowers on the ground - one from Ducky, one from Abby, one from Tim and one from Tony. The next year, in the middle of spring, Tony bends down onto his knees – slower than he might have done once; he is older now obviously, and since the incident all months ago signs of age have begun to flourish on his body – and plants flowers beneath the tree. Pansies, daffodils, anything he thinks she might have liked.

Abby plunges into despair and for a few weeks, her friends think this might be like Gibbs all over again. Her courage is stronger this time, and she puts herself back together. There are cracks and glitches and there are moments where it is clear that she has changed, and grown. Her music is different – often gospel hymns and Arabic melodies interrupt the blaring punk/goth/rock music she once took pride in. She keeps reminders on the walls of all her friends, especially those she has lost. In the corner of the ballistics lab, there is a shrine, and occasionally you can find McGee or Jimmy staring at it, Ducky placing a flower on the altar of it.

Sometimes you will find a mysteriously lit candle, though nobody ever lays claim to lighting it. Tony is always mysteriously absent at this point.

Abby adds to her tattoo collection in the months after Ziva's death. On her left wrist goes Ziva's name and her right wrist bears the simple elegy LJG. He is her guiding light, and Ziva her balancing partner. She adds a J in cursive Gothic font to her shoulder – she was never as close to Jenny as she could have been, but nonetheless, she was a friend and a friend who earned her place. She has plans for Tony, McGee, Ducky and even Jimmy but not yet. She's still sketching the plans.

Tim mourns for months again, immersing himself in grief. But eventually, even he pulls out of it, and has Ziva's name carved into memory. Instead of his body, he chooses a cherry wood plaque and has Ziva, Gibbs and Jenny etched into it. It hangs above his desk and many new Probies have asked its purpose.

To never forget those we love, to never lose sight of our purpose and to always inspire great things, he tells them. They think he's very strange. He knows that's what Gibbs, Ziva and Jenny would have wanted. He does have Gibbs tattooed on his shoulder though – in the hope that the awesome sharpshooting abilities and the courage in the face of danger that stilled a trembling hand that Gibbs possessed might transfer to him.

His girlfriends think it's strange. He doesn't care.

Ziva's death is the final straw for Tony. He becomes a replica Gibbs, except without the occasional niceness and with his own special brand of bastard plastered over the top. It's no longer a job, either.

It's a personal mission.

He practises in gym, logging easily thirty hours a week, every week, without fail. He spends ages at the punch bag, rowing machines, chasing invisible perps while on the treadmills almost at the limit of his endurance and every few months, the fitness supervisor submits a new request to the director for new equipment – punch bags which have lost their stuffing, treadmills pushed beyond their limits, rowing machines which have been worn out.

Vance just signs on the dotted line.

Vance and Tony aren't friendly – there's none of the special bond between them like it was between Gibbs and Jenny. It's all teeth, barbs and working together out of necessity rather than anything else. Tony knows this – he's too angry to even try to get close to a man who sits on the top of the agency and controls every string from here to Canada. He's still angry, still hateful, still raging against the world. Vance and he share a relationship around work, crystal clear in its function. He still has the privilege to move in and out of MTAC when he pleases, still invades the director's office at all hours of the day and night, still calls Vance 'Leon' when they're alone. Tony is top brass, without the brass – he has knowledge and access that even the deputy directors don't often get. It's well known knowledge around the agency that Tony and Vance are a balancing act – Vance needs Tony because he's now one of the most senior resident NCIS agents still in active service, and he's quite literally one of the best. His gut, as Gibbs would say, has led the way through numerous successful mission and undercover operations, there are some things Tony just _knows_ and the director has to trust in that gut; he's an asset to the agency – one Vance cannot afford to lose through alienation. He's just that damn good. Tony needs Vance to control the media, to cover for his team and he when they do things the right way not the 'legal way', to protect everyone in his team from the politics of these cases.

Anger is still there, and even though Tony is in his late forties now, and should be thinking about winding down his career, maybe advancing up the ranks into the world of desk jobs and complex paperwork things, he doesn't. Tony's still out there, pounding the streets, driving the sedan at breakneck speeds through the streets of America. He doesn't date, isn't married, has no children. He isn't interested anymore – not in pretty women, not in lovely ladies in their primes. He doesn't have a boat in his basement, but he does have a gun collection that's increasing, and a race car in his garage which is his only housemate, it seems.

At night, you can look into the bullpen, and see a single solitary light on, a desk still littered with paperwork and a pair of glasses resting on the top of the stack of folders still waiting to be read. Tony's older now, his knees are going from years of chasing criminals on top his football career – he has arthritis staring him in the face every morning and sometimes he wakes up and feels the plague advancing back up his lungs, aged beyond their years. He's been getting gentle pressure from the legal department to retire now, while he's still successful and still able to leave of his own accord. He tells them, not very politely, to leave him the fuck alone, and to get out his life. Every morning, you'll find him at his desk from five or at the latest, six o'clock onwards – he eats, even sleeps at that desk sometimes.

Tony even looks like Gibbs, only one that's hard and cold and driven. He's going grey and sometimes, he sits down with a heavy sigh and realises that he just really wants a hot cup of tea and his bed, before getting out the chair again to run down some more evidence. His body is still as hard as ever – it'll stay like that until he retires, McGee reckons.

If he ever retires.

He has tattoos, now. Ziva over his heart, Jenny on his left arm, Gibbs on his right. On his forearm, he has "To Protect and Serve," from his days at a cop emblazoned over a sketch of his old badge, complete with his old number. On his right shoulder, he has Kate flowing in cursive. It's actually her handwriting – he had a copy brought up from some of her notes and took it to the graphics department. He feels something every time he raises his gun and quite literally, Kate is right behind his every move. He's thinking of where to put Abby, McGee and Ducky next - where to put the people you love on your body?

He's angry still, still raging against the machine of the world. He's a cold, angry man, in a cold angry world, and he knows it. He's never let go of that anger, doesn't plan to. He's still holding onto Gibbs' memories, holding on to Jenny and Ziva and Kate and Paula, and even Chris Pacci in a way.

He's never stopped searching for redemption.

He's never stopped grieving.

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_**So, what did you think? I know, I know. You all want chapters for something else, not a new story and a crap one at that. I'm just struggling to find inspiration for them at the moment. They're very complex stories and right now, they're happening literally about three hundred words at a time. Fingers crossed, once I actually find the manuscript for WACIB, and for Brother, Slave, Pet I can actually start posting them again. I stashed them in a file somewhere and for the life of me I cannot find where. **_

_**Well, I have work in about twenty minutes, so I'm off to go and get dressed and then off to go to work. **_

_**Drop me a line, and please don't be afraid to point out spelling errors – my laptop has temporarily erased its function of Add to Dictionary – Ziva still comes up as a spelling error and I've had to beat it into submission to accept Tony's as a real word for some reason. Anyway, toodles, have fun and enjoy your day responsibly~**_

_**Hung Parliament, anyone?**_


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